Magda Goebbels

Johanna Maria Magdalena "Magda" Ritschel (11 November 1901-1 May 1945) was the wife of the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. During the Battle of Berlin, the two poisoned their six children before killing themselves.

Biography
Johanna Maria Magdalena Ritschel was born in Berlin, German Empire on 11 November 1901, and her parents divorced soon after her birth. In 2016, it was revealed that her true father may have been a Jewish leather goods magnate and not her German father, Oskar Ritschel. She married the German industrialist Gunther Quandt (who was twice her age) in 1921, and she converted from Catholicism to Protestantism. However, she grew angry due to her husband's frequent absence, and she had an affair. In 1929, her husband discovered this, and he annulled their marriage.

In 1930, Ritschel joined the Nazi Party, having been impressed by a speech given by Berlin gauleiter Joseph Goebbels. They married in December 1931 with Adolf Hitler himself as a witness, and she was nicknamed the "First Lady of the Third Reich" due to her social connections, upper class, and the power that she wielded as Goebbels' wife. She was also one of Hitler's few female friends. In April 1945, her family moved into the Fuhrerbunker in Berlin as Soviet Red Army troops invaded Nazi Germany, and she decided that her children were "too good" to live in the era after Nazism. She failed to persuade Hitler not to kill himself, having broken down after Hitler gave her his golden party badge. She wrote a farewell letter to her son from her first marriage, a Luftwaffe POW in North Africa, and she resolved to kill herself. With the help of Ludwig Stumpfegger, she sedated her children and gave them cyanide in their sleep, killing all six of them. Joseph then shot her outside of the bunker before shooting himself in the head. The German soldiers proceeded to burn both of their bodies with petrol.